NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — When tech billionaire Elon Musk took the stage for his surprise appearance at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference early Thursday evening, he was greeted with a hero’s welcome, complete with a gilded chainsaw gifted to him by Argentine President Javier Milei.
But even as attendees and speakers at the annual right-wing political convention embraced Musk, who has transformed from a self-described center-left-leaning Silicon Valley CEO to a key player in the second Trump administration, they remained skeptical of the tech industry writ large. Some called for congressional crackdowns and demanded accountability from the industry, while a smaller subset were hopeful that President Donald Trump’s return to the White House could herald an evolving mindset among tech leaders.
As technology companies, which have often aligned more closely with Democrats, adjust to the reality of a new Trump term, some figures have taken steps to ingratiate themselves with the Trump administration. But it was evident throughout CPAC that Republicans might not be quite ready to forgive and forget — and some members of the party are still looking for payback.
“[Meta CEO] Mark Zuckerberg, he’s saying one thing on camera, then doing something else behind your back,” Baltimore resident and self-described longtime Musk follower Lisa Bukowski said. “He’s funding both sides, so I don’t trust him.”
Attendees’ top complaints echo many of the concerns Republicans have cited for years regarding tech giants, including censorship, monopolization and potential harms, especially to children. But even as some industry leaders have taken steps to bend the knee to Trump, conservatives aren’t curbing their skepticism.
Tech companies like Amazon.com Inc. Meta Platforms Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. and CEOs like Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman donated a combined millions of dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund.
And companies’ policies are evolving in the second Trump administration as well: Meta has announced the end of its third-party fact-checking program, which included a focus on political disinformation.
Mike Davis, a conservative legal activist, said onstage that he wants to see tech companies held accountable for their efforts to combat misinformation amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which he said should be considered censorship. He did, however, thank tech leaders for their donations to Trump’s inaugural fund.
“It was a fun party, but Mark Zuckerberg spent, what, $400 million chasing President Trump out of office in 2020?” Davis said. “So $400 million versus $1 million, I think he has a lot of catching up to do.”
Davis is referring to the more than $400 million in grants from Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan through a pair of nonpartisan institutions that were intended to cover polling site accommodations across the country related to the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2024 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the grants “didn’t noticeably affect the outcome” of the 2020 election.
Tech companies are also seeing a different form of backlash from their decisions to ban Trump in the days following the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. Trump has sued both Meta and X, formerly known as Twitter, in response to their bans, and in recent weeks both companies have settled in the cases.
Meta settled for $25 million, with around $22 million heading to a fund for Trump’s presidential library. X, which is now owned by Musk, is paying $10 million to settle, a figure Trump described as a “big discount” in a Fox News interview. The Wall Street Journal first reported both payouts.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, said his panel will continue to press technology leaders on their free speech and moderation policies. Congress has repeatedly questioned industry CEOs in recent years on issues ranging from child safety to data privacy.
“We’re gonna have some fun hearings and bring people in and hold people to account for trying to take away your right to speak your mind,” Schmitt said during a Thursday panel. “So to whoever’s watching this who engaged in that activity, stay tuned.”
Change in direction?
However, there are still some Republicans who see elements of promise in the tech industry’s efforts to mend its relationships with Trump.
Maryland resident John Myrick, who mounted a long-shot campaign for the Republican nomination for Senate in 2024 and announced a campaign for governor earlier this month, said he sees the relationship between Musk and Trump as something for the tech industry to emulate.
“The relationship is becoming more and more solid between the tech industry and government in order to make things better for America,” Myrick said. “And that’s a win for everyone.”
Myrick also said he hopes to see these tech companies “reevaluate their positions when it comes to things like censorship and cracking down on dissenting views.”
But that evolution may come more by force than by choice, as the Trump administration is already taking steps to investigate practices that conservatives have described as censorship.
The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday launched an inquiry into “how technology platforms deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations, and how this conduct may have violated the law.”
Tech giants, for their part, have repeatedly cited free speech concerns in response to a range of content moderation concerns. And the Supreme Court in July 2024 unanimously ruled that First Amendment protections apply to social media moderation.
Musk may stand alone as the tech leader who has made the most dynamic shift thus far in his relationship with Republicans. But the richest man in the world reveled on Thursday in the attention he’s received since he joined the GOP’s ranks. The event was also Musk’s first public event since he made headlines for a gesture at a rally after Trump’s inauguration that many likened to a Nazi salute.
“I’m living the meme,” Musk said on the CPAC stage while adorned in sunglasses and a gold chain at the start of an interview during which he at times struggled to put together coherent sentences. “There’s living the dream and there’s living the meme, and it’s pretty much what’s happening.”
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